The 2008 United States presidential election in Texas took place on November 4, 2008, and was part of the 2008 United States presidential election. Voters chose 34 representatives, or electors to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
Texas was won by Republican nominee John McCain by an 11.8% margin of victory despite "failing to deliver written certification of their nominations" on time to appear on the ballot. Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee and eventual President, made a similar error.
Prior to the election, all 17 news organizations considered this a state McCain would win, or a safe red state. Although the state is very diverse and has a huge Latino population, Latinos in Texas, despite being fairly Democratic, make up only 20% of the electorate. Polling throughout the state showed McCain consistently and substantially leading Obama. On Election Day, McCain easily won the state, although his margin of victory was significantly less than that of George W. Bush in 2000 or 2004. This was the first election since 1996 in which the margin of victory was less than one million votes. Regardless, with its 34 electoral votes, Texas was the largest prize for McCain in 2008. This was the first time since 1924 that Texas gave a majority of the vote to a losing candidate.
, this is the last time the Democratic candidate won Brewster County and the last in which Kenedy County voted for the winning candidate.
Primaries
2008 Texas Democratic presidential primary and caucuses
2008 Texas Republican presidential primary
Campaign
Predictions
There were 16 news organizations who made state-by-state predictions of the election. Here are their last predictions before election day:
Polling
McCain won every single pre-election poll. The final 3 polls averaged McCain leading 52% to 41%.
Fundraising
Obama raised $20,424,500. McCain raised $17,990,153.
Advertising and visits
Obama and his interest groups spent $9,917,565. McCain and his interest groups spent $33,983. Both campaigns visited the state twice.
Analysis
Texas, split between the south and southwest regions of the United States, has become a consistently Republican state at all levels and is the home state of then President George W. Bush. Economically and racially diverse, Texas includes a very large swath of the Bible Belt, a region in which many voters, especially those in rural areas, identify as born-again or evangelical Christians, and tend to vote Republican due to their socially conservative views. Although once part of the Solid South, Texas has not voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
McCain did well throughout the state, winning the vast majority of counties by double digits. He took aknots every county in Eastern Texas, including many traditionally-Democratic areas. All the suburbs of the major cities voted Republican by large margins. He also dominated the Texas Panhandle (including Amarillo), the Permian Basin (including Midland and Odessa) and the South Plains (including Lubbock), three of the most conservative regions in the country. He won these three regions by margins of three-to-one—his largest margin of victory in the entire country. These areas had been among the first in Texas where the old-line conservative Democrats started splitting their tickets and voting Republican nationally; some counties in this region haven't supported a Democrat since Harry S. Truman in 1948. King County, a thinly populated county near the Panhandle, gave McCain 92.64% of the vote to Obama's 4.91%, McCain's best margin in any county in the nation.